Newsletter

Charleston warns Savannah about cruise ships

CHARLESTON, S.C. — The cautionary tales came Thursday from our neighboring port city, but they were shared by others from Alaska and British Columbia and from Norway, Cozumel and Venice.

Once big cruise ships come to a city, they can overwhelm a community’s resources — crowding streets, jamming sidewalks and attractions, contributing to pollution and generating far less in spending and tax dollars than is usually anticipated.

For several Savannah residents, the message was coming through loud and clear at a conference called Harboring Tourism, an international symposium on cruise ships in historic port communities.

“This just really trumpets the need for a tourism management plan,” said Daniel Carey, president and CEO of Historic Savannah Foundation. “This is revealing all of the holes and gaps we have in how we manage tourism. For us, I think this is a timing issue. I don't think we should talk about cruise ships until we plan the other. At a minimum, we better slow down and really do our homework.”

Carey, Kent and Toni Harrington and Pam Miller were among the Savannah residents to attend the Charleston conference, an event sponsored by the Preservation Society of Charleston, The World Monument Fund and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Charleston in 2010 became a home-port for a Carnival cruise ship, a move that city business leaders heralded for its $70 million in direct annual spending but one preservationists bemoan for its high-volume impacts.

The city of Savannah is in the first phase of evaluating whether it will offer itself as a home port cruise city. City Council approved a $279,500 study, currently under way, to determine whether a cruise ship has room to turn around in the Savannah River, could coordinate with port traffic and would have sufficient berthing space. If those conditions can be met, a second phase would examine sites for their traffic patterns, parking and infrastructure needs, said Marty Johnston, the city’s director of special projects.

Johnston, too, made the trip to Charleston, as did Chatham County-Savannah Metropolitan Planning Commission staffer Sarah Ward, and both found useful information.

“I think it’s important from the city’s standpoint to look at all sides of it,” Johnston said. “I do think Charleston has a handle on regulating bigger tourism.”

Miller, a community activist, co-founded a group called Be Smart Savannah to monitor the city’s policies on cruise ships.

“We have such a valuable opportunity to learn what’s going on in Charleston,” she said during a break at the conference.

To that, Sallie Duell, a long-time Charlestonian sitting across the table responded: “Are you from Savannah? Well, you can have it. You can have the cruises. The absurdity of this situation is that there’s no benefit to the community.”